The test demonstrates one of the temptations a developer meets when writing tests.

What we have here is actually 3 tests, but layed out as a single function with 3 asserts.

Sometimes it’s easier to write this way, but if an error occurs, it’s much less obvious what went wrong.

If an error happens in the middle of a complex execution flow, then we’ll have to figure out the data at that point. We’ll actually have to debug the test.

It would be much better to break the test into multiple it blocks with clearly written inputs and outputs.

Like this:

describe("Raises x to power n", function() {
  it("5 in the power of 1 equals 5", function() {
    assert.equal(pow(5, 1), 5);
  });

  it("5 in the power of 2 equals 25", function() {
    assert.equal(pow(5, 2), 25);
  });

  it("5 in the power of 3 equals 125", function() {
    assert.equal(pow(5, 3), 125);
  });
});

We replaced the single it with describe and a group of it blocks. Now if something fails we would see clearly what the data was.

Also we can isolate a single test and run it in standalone mode by writing it.only instead of it:

describe("Raises x to power n", function() {
  it("5 in the power of 1 equals 5", function() {
    assert.equal(pow(5, 1), 5);
  });

  // Mocha will run only this block
  it.only("5 in the power of 2 equals 25", function() {
    assert.equal(pow(5, 2), 25);
  });

  it("5 in the power of 3 equals 125", function() {
    assert.equal(pow(5, 3), 125);
  });
});